Journalists are supposed to stay neutral. But, when it comes to reporting on a viral protest against a gay conversion therapy program, young, lesbian reporter Anna Mitchell isn’t so sure she agrees with what’s neutral anymore. Gay Christian Speed Dating takes place in Iowa City, Iowa and follows Anna Mitchell, who has moved in with her parents after getting laid off from her prestigious breaking news job. When performance artist college kids go viral protesting a local gay conversion therapy program, it might be Anna’s one shot to get back in the journalism game. But Anna has conflicts of interest: a crush on the girl who is leading the protest, and, even worse, her own opinions on the subject matter that she can’t seem to keep from spilling. This contemporary new adult novel is 42,000 words in a tone of The Great Believers meets Priestdaddy. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2020. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Fourteen short stories, with five interspersed vignettes, describe the lives of gay people in the southwestern United States, centered around a fictional gay country-and-western bar in Dallas and a small town in Oklahoma. Various characters, themes, and trajectories recur in the manner of a short story cycle, as explained in the prefatory Critical Analysis, which focuses on exemplary works of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Shirley Jackson, Italo Calvino, Yevgeny Kharitonov, and Louise Erdrich.

During the last two decades, Mainland China has seen a rise in the emergence of homosexually charged themes in popular underground literature via the spread of the “Danmei” novel. Mandarin for “indulge in beauty,” the term refers to works of fiction centering on graphic depictions of same-sex love between two central male characters. By the late nineties, an explosion of online Danmei forums proved to be a powerful tool in circumventing government censors, and authorship (mainly by young heterosexual women) skyrocketed. Xiao Chun’s Collide, first uploaded to the internet in 2006, swept through online message boards and reading forums to become one of the cornerstone pieces of the Danmei genre. Banned for its lascivious homosexual content, its rabid Internet consumption throughout China and Taiwan has contributed to (and, indeed, sheds light on) a wide array of observable changes occurring in the modern Chinese social landscape. This paper begins with a brief explanation of what little is known about the author of Collide, as well as an introduction to the background of the Danmei movement. Following these sections, a discussion of the sociocultural relevance of the Danmei movement will be presented with special attention paid to the significance of female-dominated authorship and readership, to the voyeurism associated with the genre, and to the relationship between Danmei literature and changing attitudes toward homosexuality. The remaining sections will provide notes from the translator and further remarks on Collide. The analysis will conclude with a full translation of the novel.